“What about horror?” Celine asked. “We were going to win! I’ve got plans!”
“The plan has failed,” Paul snapped. “Forcing them to quit was a good plan, but not in the face of the death of the human race!”
“Actually, Bowman, it has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams,” the Demon rumbled.
“What?” Paul said, cocking his head suspiciously. “Explain yourself.”
“I can, Paul,” Celine said, waving the projections away and bringing up new ones. “I prepared the reports. Current population of the earth is just above one billion. Control of the Net has fractured, power has failed, different members of the Council have seized, for the most part, certain historical areas. Chansa in Frika, Sheida in Norau, yourself in Ropasa, etc.”
“Your point,” the council leader ground out.
“My point is that deaths are going to be high in the first two months. Very high. But in each of these areas, council members are acting, as they see fit, to ensure the survival of as many as possible.”
“We’re still talking about millions of deaths!” Paul snapped.
“But we’re talking about far more population increase,” Celine continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “Indeed, we’re talking about a near doubling of the population in two to three generations.”
“What?” Paul paused. “How?”
“Frankly, your initial plan probably would not have worked,” Celine said. “As long as there were artificial means of replication and reproduction management, birth levels would remain low no matter what you did to encourage it. However, with all of that taken away, birth rates are bound to skyrocket.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Paul ground out.
“The nannites have turned off,” Celine replied with a smirk. “That means other things have turned on.”
Rachel was more or less moping around the house when Daneh found her.
“Come on, girl, time to start your education,” Daneh said, snatching up a satchel.
“What do you mean?” Her mother was acting different this morning. Rachel couldn’t put her finger on it but something of the despair had seemed to leave her. Whatever the reason, she was glad.
“You said you wanted to be a doctor,” Daneh replied, heading for the door. “Bethan Raeburn has started to bleed internally. That’s all I know. Come on.”
Tom Raeburn was outside the house with two saddled horses, looking very worried.
“What can you tell me?” Daneh said as she mounted with a wince.
“Not much. Mom just started bleeding all of a sudden. From her… well from her bottom.”
“From her anus?” Daneh asked. “There’s various reasons that that might occur, none of them life threatening.” They were already starting to canter down the hill, not following the main road but cutting across the open area around the side of the town.
“Not from her… anus,” Tom said. “The… the other part. I’m sorry if I’m being unclear, but this is my mother, okay?”
“Okay,” Daneh answered. She wracked her brain for what might be wrong and there was something nagging at her. But for the life of her, the only thing that came to mind was some sort of internal injury. “Did she fall? Was she hit?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Tom said.
Daneh held her peace until they reached the sprawling farmyard, then hurried inside with Rachel at her heels.
They went upstairs to where Myron was standing outside the bedroom door, wringing his hands.
“Thank God you’re here, Daneh,” Myron said. “I… she’s… I just can’t take it. Please help her!”
“I’ll see what I can do, Myron,” Daneh answered, secretly fearful that there wouldn’t be much she could do. Without nannites she was virtually helpless. She might know the inner workings of the human body, but fixing that body took tools she no longer possessed.
Inside the room she found Bethan in bed, apparently naked, curled up in a miserable ball on her side, the sheet on the bed pulled up on her hips.
“How are you, Beth?” she asked, pulling the sheet down. There was a wad of rags stuffed into the woman’s crotch and it was spotted with red. There was more that had trickled down the woman’s leg onto the bed. All in all it looked as if she had bled about a deciliter.
“Daneh,” Bethan said helplessly. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Be calm,” Daneh answered, taking her hand and wrist. She remembered the simple method of taking a pulse but she didn’t have a way to time it. The woman’s pulse felt fine, though, strong and a bit fast, but that could be put down to understandable fear. “Other than the bleeding, what are the symptoms?” she asked, feeling the woman’s neck and face. No signs of fever and while she was a bit pale she didn’t seem to be in shock.
“Nothing,” Bethan answered. “I’ve been a little… grouchy lately and then I started to hurt in the stomach yesterday. Then today I just started bleeding!”
“No impacts?” Daneh asked. “I’m sorry to ask this, but nobody hit you, did they?”
“No!” Bethan practically snarled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Like I said, I’ve been grouchy. I would have hit them, not the other way around!”
“There doesn’t seem to be a reason,” Daneh said in exasperation. “I can’t sew it up. And I can’t get into the interior to see what’s bleeding!” She knew better than to show her discomfort in front of a patient, but this was the first time she’d had to deal with something like this. “No tools, no diagnostics. Aggh! I need to think.” She looked at the woman and took her pulse again. Still strong. “Bethan, whatever is happening, you’re not showing any other signs. You don’t appear to be… damaged from the bleeding. Just let me think.”
She stood back and paced as she ran through the anatomy of the female reproductive system. Something had clearly gone badly wrong. Cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries… Something was haywire. She hadn’t paid much attention to the system since medical school, it was just there, as useless as the vermiform appendix that most people no longer had. With uterine replicators reproduction had all been moved out of the female body thank God and… Oh, My, God!
She stopped with her face in her hand, blinded by her own stupidity. But she wasn’t the only one who had missed the obvious.
“Bethan, do your cows reproduce naturally or do you have them raised in a replicator?” she asked.
“They reproduce naturally. We try to… Oh!”
“And do they ever bleed? The females?”
“Yes, after they’ve ovulated,” Bethan said with horror in her voice.
“And that’s once every?”
“Six months or so. But humans…”
“Humans ovulate every month!” Daneh wailed. “The curse! Damnit, I knew this was familiar!”
“This is natural?” Bethan asked. “This is supposed to happen?”
“Once a month,” Daneh said, the memory finally dropping into place. “Every twenty-eight days.”
“For how long?’
“I don’t know… a week?”
“Oh, My, God!”
“Mom, what about me?” Rachel asked, frantically.
“You, me, all of us,” Daneh responded.